Red-Letter Day
The Mother of Our Lord
August 15
also known as Mary of Nazareth, Mary, Mother of Jesus, The Virgin Mary, St. Mary, Theotokos
Mary of Nazareth is the mother of Jesus Christ, the woman through whom the Word became flesh. The Gospels show her at every hinge of the gospel: the Annunciation, where she gave her consent to God; the Magnificat, where she sang of a Lord who lifts up the lowly; the foot of the cross, where she did not flee; and the upper room at Pentecost. The church honors her above every other saint as Theotokos, the God-bearer, the title given by the Council of Ephesus in 431, and as the first and truest of disciples.
Mary was a young woman of Nazareth, a town in Galilee, betrothed to a carpenter named Joseph, when the angel Gabriel came to her and told her she would bear a son, and that her son would be the Son of the Most High, whose kingdom would have no end. She was a virgin, and what was asked of her was impossible, and frightening, and would expose her to shame. She asked how it could be, and was told that the Holy Spirit would come upon her. And then this girl, with the whole weight of it before her, gave the answer on which the world turned: Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word. In that consent the Word became flesh.
She went to her cousin Elizabeth, who was carrying the child who would be John the Baptist, and when Elizabeth blessed her as the mother of her Lord, Mary answered with a song, the song the church has sung at evening prayer for fifteen centuries. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, she sang, and she sang not of herself but of a God who scatters the proud and casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. The mother of the Lord was the first to understand what kind of Lord he would be.
She bore Jesus in a stable at Bethlehem and laid him in a manger. She brought him to the Temple, where the old man Simeon told her that a sword would pierce her own soul too. She raised him at Nazareth through the long hidden years. When he began his ministry it was at her quiet word, at a wedding in Cana, that he worked the first of his signs. She did not always understand him; no mother of such a son could. But she kept faith with him to the end.
And the end was a sword indeed. She stood at the foot of the cross while her son was tortured to death above her, one of the few who did not run. And from the cross, in his agony, Jesus gave her away: he looked at her, and at the disciple he loved, and said, Woman, behold your son, and to the disciple, Behold your mother. The mother of the Lord became, in that hour, the mother of his church. After he was raised and ascended, she was there in the upper room with the apostles, praying, when the Spirit fell at Pentecost. The girl who had said let it be to me was present at the birth of the church as she had been at the birth of its Lord.
Scripture says no more of her. The church has loved her beyond all the other saints, and has told many stories of her falling asleep and her passing into glory, more than it can prove; but it has never needed a story to know what she is. She is the one who believed when belief cost everything, the first and truest of the disciples, the woman through whom God came among us. The promise of her own song has been kept, that all generations would call her blessed. And the body that bore the Lord of life, whether on Heaven or still on earth, waits with all the faithful, for the resurrection Jesus came through her to bring.
Everything the church knows of Mary with certainty comes from the New Testament, and there she stands at every hinge of the gospel. The infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke give the Annunciation, the virginal conception, the birth at Bethlehem, and the presentation in the Temple; Luke alone preserves the Magnificat. She is at the wedding at Cana and at the foot of the cross in John, and among the disciples praying in the upper room before Pentecost in Acts. After that the Scriptures fall silent about her. The further stories, of her parents Joachim and Anne, her childhood in the Temple, and her death, come from later and non-canonical sources, chiefly the second-century Protevangelium of James, and are held more loosely.
The traditions about Mary are of very different weight, and the Anglican church distinguishes among them with care. The title Theotokos, God-bearer or Mother of God, was affirmed by the Council of Ephesus in 431 and carries full conciliar authority; it is a statement about Christ before it is one about Mary, guarding the truth that the one born of her was God the Son and not a man God later joined to himself, and the Anglican church holds it without reserve. The perpetual virginity of Mary was taught by Fathers such as Jerome and Augustine and was the common belief of the undivided church; Anglicans have held it widely, though not as a defined article. The later Marian dogmas stand differently. The bodily Assumption of Mary, kept in the East as her Dormition, her falling asleep, and defined as binding dogma in the Roman Catholic Church only in 1950, and the Immaculate Conception, defined at Rome in 1854, rest on traditions later than the apostolic witness; the Thirty-Nine Articles are silent on them, and Anglicans hold them, if at all, as pious opinion and not as required belief. The invocation of the saints, the practice of praying to Mary as an intercessor, the twenty-second Article names "a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture"; the reformers cut it away, while leaving wholly intact the honor due to Mary as the mother of the Lord and the foremost of the redeemed. The Anglican position is, in the end, the ancient one: Mary is truly the God-bearer, blessed among women and honored above every other saint, and the honor paid her runs through her to the God who magnified her.
The principal feast of Mary falls on 15 August. The Anglican calendars keep it simply as Saint Mary the Virgin; in the East it is the Dormition, the falling asleep of the Mother of God; in the Roman Church it is the Assumption. Her liturgical color is white. The church keeps several other days of Mary through the year: the Annunciation on 25 March, the Visitation on 31 May, and the Birth of Mary on 8 September among them.
In Anglican devotion Mary is honored most constantly not on her feasts but every single evening, for her own song, the Magnificat, is appointed at Evening Prayer, so that wherever Anglicans pray the office her words are on the church's lips at the close of every day. She is the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady, the Theotokos; countless churches and the Lady Chapels within great churches are dedicated to her.
In Christian art she is more depicted than any other figure save Christ himself. She is shown in blue at the Annunciation with the angel before her; as the Madonna with the child on her knee; as the sorrowing mother who holds her dead son at the foot of the cross, the Pietà; and, in the icons of the East, as the Theotokos who points always away from herself and toward the child she carries. That gesture is the truest portrait of her, the woman whose whole greatness is that she bore, and points to, her Lord.
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Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture(English, 1996)
Recommended: Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University Press)
The finest single ecumenical study, by the great historian of doctrine, tracing how the church has understood and portrayed Mary from the Gospels to the present; learned, generous, and accessible.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Further reading. For the place of Mary across the whole history of Christian faith and culture, Jaroslav Pelikan's Mary Through the Centuries, listed above, is the great ecumenical survey. For the specifically Anglican reckoning with her, the Anglican-Roman Catholic agreed statement Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005) sets out how far the two communions can now confess the same things about her. Tim Perry's Mary for Evangelicals is a warm study from within the Reformation tradition.
Online resources. The ARCIC statement Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ is freely readable in full at the Anglican Communion website.
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O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of your incarnate Son: Grant that we, who have been redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory of your eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Isaiah 61:10–11Psalm 34Galatians 4:4–7Luke 1:46–55
British (Received Pronunciation): Pietà /ˌpiːeɪˈtɑː/; Theotokos /ˌθiːəˈtoʊkɒs/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/